http://beebo.org/smackerels/meet-the-cripples.html Recently I’ve been writing some log analysis code to produce detailed page-level statistics, but a side-effect is that it’s now possible to illustrate what I call the “deformed people” effect.
Basically, it so happens that inserting the terms used to find a page into the page itself increases the ranking of that page. Not so unexpected, I suppose, but the size of effect was a little surprising.
The graph below shows hits per week to the “Meet the Cripples” page linked above; the extra hits in recent weeks came via Google:
This page quite suddenly became popular because:
- until recently the page contained the words deformed and people—though not next to each other.
- the previous iteration of my statistics software included referrer information on the page itself (mirror).
- searching for deformed people (used to) suggest this link a few pages into the search results.
- a persistent few clicked this far into the search results, and then view the “Meet the Cripples” page, which
- (through the stats software) added the text deformed people to my page.
- Google, now seeing the phrase deformed people on my page, increased its ranking to #1 (mirror).
So, it seems that it’s possible to boost the rank of some pages (note that no page directly links to “Meet the Cripples,” so the probably more reliable PageRank technology isn’t involved) by tuning the text so that it better matches the sort of things people are looking for. (Which you can easily determine by looking the page’s referrers.) 10:43
